I Had But
To Subtract 3.5 Miles From My Noon Latitude.
All the elements being
present, I worked up my longitude.
But this was my eight o'clock longitude. Since then, and up till
noon, I had made 23.7 miles of westing. What was my noon longitude?
I followed the rule, turning to Traverse Table No. II. Entering the
table, according to rule, and going through every detail, according
to rule, I found the difference of longitude for the four hours to
be 25 miles. I was aghast. I entered the table again, according to
rule; I entered the table half a dozen times, according to rule, and
every time found that my difference of longitude was 25 miles. I
leave it to you, gentle reader. Suppose you had sailed 24 miles and
that you had covered 3.5 miles of latitude, then how could you have
covered 25 miles of longitude? Even if you had sailed due west 24
miles, and not changed your latitude, how could you have changed
your longitude 25 miles? In the name of human reason, how could you
cover one mile more of longitude than the total number of miles you
had sailed?
It was a reputable traverse table, being none other than Bowditch's.
The rule was simple (as navigators' rules go); I had made no error.
I spent an hour over it, and at the end still faced the glaring
impossibility of having sailed 24 miles, in the course of which I
changed my latitude 3.5 miles and my longitude 25 miles. The worst
of it was that there was nobody to help me out. Neither Charmian
nor Martin knew as much as I knew about navigation. And all the
time the Snark was rushing madly along toward Tanna, in the New
Hebrides. Something had to be done.
How it came to me I know not - call it an inspiration if you will;
but the thought arose in me: if southing is latitude, why isn't
westing longitude? Why should I have to change westing into
longitude? And then the whole beautiful situation dawned upon me.
The meridians of longitude are 60 miles (nautical) apart at the
equator. At the poles they run together. Thus, if I should travel
up the 180 degrees meridian of longitude until I reached the North
Pole, and if the astronomer at Greenwich travelled up the 0 meridian
of longitude to the North Pole, then, at the North Pole, we could
shake hands with each other, though before we started for the North
Pole we had been some thousands of miles apart. Again: if a degree
of longitude was 60 miles wide at the equator, and if the same
degree, at the point of the Pole, had no width, then somewhere
between the Pole and the equator that degree would be half a mile
wide, and at other places a mile wide, two miles wide, ten miles
wide, thirty miles wide, ay, and sixty miles wide.
All was plain again.
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